What started as a university project, grew to become a full fledged point and click game known as The White Chamber. Remember those old things where you used the mouse to interact with the environment, usually through gathering items to solve puzzles while enjoying a good story? The last game like this that I reviewed was The Whispered World, which I berated for having ass backwards logic and horrific voice acting that'd make every Sonic The Hedgehog voice cast sound convincing. What about The White Chamber? Is this the next point and click game to make me feel all squirmy inside, or will it make me want to go and play Tales Of Monkey Island or Broken Sword?

The White Chamber follows a nameless woman who has found herself asleep inside a coffin... inside a spaceship. She has no idea where she is or how she got in the ship, so she investigates in hopes of piecing her memory together. However, everything in this ship is not as it seems. A lot can and will happen inside that will hinder her progress, maybe even kill her, and above all else, give you quite a noodle scratcher of a mystery.

It's the kind of story that does everything in its power to draw you in. It starts by asking you if you regret, which makes you think “regret what? In general or.. what!?”, and proceeds by not really giving you many details. Whatever details it does give you manages to be enough to keep you playing so that you'll want to piece together what's being said in the video discs that you find (which detail the events that happened on the ship before the game started). It's one of those stories that's intentionally vague, to make you feel like the character who has no recollection of what's happened; not the sort that irritates you via inept storytelling.

It's complimented by an unrelentingly dark presentation. The ship looks like it's seen better days – what, with the dark colors and blood in some places, and hey, what's a bloody labcoat doing in that room? What happened here? That's what you'll be thinking as you explore the ship. That's not to mention the moments when it feels like you're walking through a blooddrenched zombie feeding ground, full of the good old red stuff we love so much.

Our character is also fairly well designed, although she seems more like a Cowboy Bebop reject, but whatever, let's take what we can get. Besides, she's well animated. Her walking, her swinging a big axe like it was a small woodchopper... okay, some are a little weird, but they're fluid enough to work well, especially when they really add to the atmosphere, as they're used just right in that case. A little treat we're given are a few short anime scenes, which have good enough animation, although they are definitely short.

To accompany it is the soundtrack, which does everything in its power to draw you in and keep you on your toes. A droning sound and your footsteps will be all that you'll hear for the majority of the game. It's really when an exciting event happens - or is about to happen – that the music picks up. It does a good job of tensing you up. It may not scare you much (that's the visual's job), but the build up is there, definitely. The voice acting is good, too. There's a lot of conviction from the actors, using the right tones to go with the feeling.

Sadly, the gameplay couldn't keep up. Now don't get me wrong – it works well enough on a fundamental level. The puzzles make sense and the items are used the way that they should be (well, most of them). Every item, collectible or otherwise, is interractable and you can get some hints by investigating them. The problem is that the difficulty only hits the extremes of “well no duh” and “brb gamefaqs because nothing I try is working”, with no puzzle hitting a happy medium, though it's mostly on the former side of the scale. It's a good thing that the puzzles require common sense, but it feels like only basic logic and basic trial and error is necessary. Most puzzles require you to place items where they ought to be, with only like one requiring you to decipher a code. Anytime it attempts to challenge you, it never feels like you have to think as much as you just use trial and error, which is fine for a fast paced game, but in a slow paced game, it just comes across as cheap. For a point and click game, that's weak. But it functions alright, so at least you can't say that it's bad... except for the fact that the camera moves a lot slower than you do which will make some basic navigation more tedious than it should be...

The big issue to be had here is that the game is very short. It's about an hour long, which is never a good thing for a point and click game. Perhaps if the puzzles were real brain busters or very excellently executed basic puzzles (which I think is what they were gunning for), then it'd be acceptable, but the puzzles never really struck as excellent – certainly not excellent enough for such a short game. Plus, it's never a good thing when your strongest suit is your story, because it doesn't give you enough time to really sink your teeth into it. You're done before you know it, killing all the immersion and leaving you going “really, that was it” while loading up Broken Sword, a much better point and click game.

Then again, they did try to soften the blow with multiple endings. The first of these are the death endings, where you'll meet your demise at the hands of various things. Like the puzzles, if you have common sense, you'll eliminate most of these threats with ease. There is one that might trump you if you're a curious person, but that's about it. Then there are good endings. What kind of good ending you'll get is determined by karma, which is gained by being a good person where it's needed, and decreases when you're a bad person. But honestly speaking, there's almost no motivation to go for these endings. It's not just because the story will have less of an impact on you (and vicariously, the game will be less interesting to play through); it's also because the endings are readily available on Youtube... I mean yeah, if the game still had the awesome going for it upon repeated playthroughs, then it'd be worth replaying to try and get the best ending, but... yeah, it isn't.

The White Chamber has very good intentions. It's a creepy game that finds ways to mess with your mind and keep you on your toes. Even if you have the story all figured out, the graphics are another thing, with some gruesome and gritty designs in tandem with an excellent usage of dark colors. Sadly, the puzzles were a bit too far on the basic and easy side, and any attempt at a higher difficulty was cheap at best. Plus, it's way too short for its own good. I suppose if you have an hour or two to kill and just have the urge to play a point and click game for free without feeling guilty, you could check this out. After all, it's free!

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That's a pretty strong intro into the review and I like the general layout of focusing heavily on the atmosphere first and detailing the literal gameplay after that.

Going through the information you've definitely picked up on a lot of critical points. It was interesting to see you note the character design choice as well as painting a picture of how the various elements are used to provoke specific thoughts by the player. It's also great that the two big offenders in the game to you are clearly highlighted and explained.

There are two things I would like to pick out. One is minor and just involves a bit of repetitive use of animation and its variant words in one of the paragraphs. Specifically with "whatever else is animated has good animation". I just figure there might be a better way to word it than to follow animated with animation so soon.

The other issue is that you confused me at one point. "The problem is that the difficulty ranges between “well no duh” and “brb gamefaqs”". Now, you do go on to explain that most puzzles fall into the too easy category and that I can understand from your explanations. But this sentence makes it sound like puzzles that cover a range of difficulties is a bad thing in this game but doesn't get expanded on. If it's a case where puzzles only hit the two extremes or something that I think it might be better off worded differently to make that clearer.

I wasn't confused about the "brb GameFAQs" part itself. I understood what you meant by that.

I don't know if I can explain this but let me change the structure slightly to see if that helps.

quote

The problem is that the difficulty ranges between “well no duh” and “brb gamefaqs because nothing I try is working”,

quote

The problem is that the difficulty only hits the extremes of “well no duh” and “brb gamefaqs because nothing I try is working”, with no puzzle hitting a happy medium

Is that any clearer? When you say the difficulty "ranges" that infers that puzzles do exist between the two extremes and that you have a problem with that. Alternatively, if you do think there is a few happy medium puzzles but the majority are hitting the extremes then maybe this:

quote

The problem is that while the game does offer a range of difficulty for the puzzles, most of them only hit either “well no duh” or “brb gamefaqs because nothing I try is working”,

This is probably just a minor matter because the overall point of the review is clear but this one part bugged me when I read it.